Nov. 2, 2025
Enchanted Journeys: Ryan Consell's Adventure in Fantasy and Found Family
Send us a text In this enchanting episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we welcome fantasy author Ryan Consell, who is set to release the fourth book in his captivating "Stealing from Wizards" series on November 4th. Ryan shares his unexpected journey into the world of writing, revealing how a casual campfire conversation ignited his passion for storytelling. He dives deep into the essence of his series, which celebrates misfits navigating the trials of adolescence within a whimsical Ca...
In this enchanting episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we welcome fantasy author Ryan Consell, who is set to release the fourth book in his captivating "Stealing from Wizards" series on November 4th. Ryan shares his unexpected journey into the world of writing, revealing how a casual campfire conversation ignited his passion for storytelling. He dives deep into the essence of his series, which celebrates misfits navigating the trials of adolescence within a whimsical Canadian wizard school. Ryan discusses the unique themes of friendship, belonging, and the joy of being true to oneself, all while balancing the challenges of writing for a middle-grade audience. Listeners will gain insights into the writing process, the importance of community support, and how to successfully market a book series. As Ryan prepares for a well-deserved break after this eight-year journey, he also teases future projects and invites you to connect with him on various platforms. Don't miss this inspiring conversation that encourages you to embrace your creativity and keep dreaming big!
www.stealingfromwizards.com
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. if you believe you can achieve.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today, I am joined by fantasy author Ryan Consel. Ryan is going to be releasing a book on November 4th. So we're going to be talking to him about this new book and series and everything that he's up to. So, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me.
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> Ryan Consel>Oh, it's a pleasure to meet you.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?
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> Ryan Consel>sure. As you said, I'm a fantasy author. I'm releasing the fourth book in the Stealing from Wizards series this, November 4th. So as we're recording very soon in the future, I'm also a teacher. I'm a lab instructor at an engineering university, up here in the Great White north in Canada.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, tell everybody how you got into, being an author.
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> Ryan Consel>sort of by accident. I didn't have any grand aspirations when I was young. I know some people dream, of being an author their whole lives, and it's a great thing. But, in my early 20s, I sort of accidentally, backed into it. I had a story that I came up with, and sort of sitting around a campfire, my partner at the time said, oh, I'd like to read that story. And I said, there's no way I can write the whole thing. But I started anyway to indulge them. And, that project, lasted longer than the relationship. And it turned out I really loved writing, which surprised me. In high school and university, I did not love writing. It was something I just had to do. But released from the bonds of due dates and assignments, it, turned out I loved it. And then I just kept doing, doing it. And so I wrote about four books before I started the Stealing From Wizards series. and over that time, I, got much better at writing, which one would hope would happen after a few novels.
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> Ryan Consel>and I just kept loving the process of creating novels.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk to the listeners about the Stealing from Wizards book, series. Kind of, explain what they can expect when they read it and where we can pick it up at all, right?
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> Ryan Consel>Absolutely. So you can pick it up, on ebook just about everywhere. So whatever your favorite platform, whether it's Amazon or Apple or Kobo, it's all over the place. physically, Amazon's probably the best place. You can order the first two books from your local bookshop. But it's unlikely that they stock them unless you're in a couple very specific places. and same thing, the fourth one will be available on Amazon and ebook everywhere. but what the series is actually about, it's more interesting than where to shop for, is middle grade to young adult wizard school fantasy.
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> Ryan Consel>and more specifically it is a story about misfits, sort of the, the trials and tribulations of being a young person that doesn't fit in, in with the backdrop of a wizard school and specifically a Canadian wizard school. So I'm up in Canada and when I started writing these, there were a lot of wizard school fantasies around. You had your Percy Jacksons and your Harry Potters, and even if you're over in Japan, you're my hero academia. But there wasn't a Canadian wizard school. And so that sort of inspired the whole thing. And as a bit of a weirdo and misfit myself, I really love stories about weirdos who get to be weirdos. There's a lot of underdog stories where you've got the down and out sports team or kid or whatever who through the course of the story, becomes the champion and overcomes their underdog status. I much preferred stories where the misfits and weirdos were still misfits and weirdos at the end of the story. And that was celebrated and delightful. And then you didn't have to change and conform and beat the other people. You just got to keep being strange.
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> Ryan Consel>And so fundamentally these books are about being weird kids. and m learning to keep being weird while making friends with other weirdos, going through the trials and tribulation, tribulations of that awkward tween period that I think we've all experienced, while also being wizards and thieves. the main character is a pickpocket and a burglar. And the inciting incident for the series, he's quite a successful pickpocket and burglar at age 12, but does get arrested. And then instead of jail they send him to school, where he is suddenly thrust into a world of wizards that he's really not equipped to deal with. He doesn't, have a lot of experience with school and that kind of thing, being a street thief and an orphan.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, talk about writing a successful book series and explain that to the listeners. And how do you know when it's time to end the story?
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> Ryan Consel>Oh, those are two very different questions.
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> Ryan Consel>I guess I'll take them in order. How to write a successful book series. I think you start by writing an unsuccessful one, and then you get lucky. there are things you can do in writing to improve your odds of success. the first is writing a good book that people enjoy reading. but that's sort of your baseline. There are lots of wonderful books that don't see any success. there's always a bit of a lottery of, like, people have to find your book and then talk about your book and share it. and so good luck, good timing really helps.
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> Ryan Consel>other critical things, making sure that it is well edited so when your audience finds it, it isn't full of typos or plot holes. and that involves building a community around your writing. So having other writers you can consult with to give you feedback, having readers that before you release it, we call them beta readers, can go through your book and talk about the things they loved and the things that didn't work for them.
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> Ryan Consel>And so you can, tailor it and tune it and get it as polished and perfect as it can be before you release it to the world. And then I think the thing that I'm doing right now and the thing that authors hate doing, very often is talking about it. it can be very hard to talk about your own work and to celebrate it. often when, we're done making any kind of art, we kind of want to just throw it out to the world and run away. A lot of us are introverts. We'd rather hide in a dark closet, than go on, charming and delightful podcasts. and so a lot of writing a successful series is about the sort of persistence in the marketing and finding the right people to help you get it out there and, and figuring out who your audience is and figuring out how to get it in front of them. there's some types of books that are easier to find the audience than others. if you're writing Romantasy, for example, there's a very hungry audience that's fairly easy to reach, because they are adults with their own budgets who shop in very specific places. And you can find them, something like middle grade fantasy, is one of the hardest because my audience aren't making their own purchasing decisions. And so I have to convince their moms, or their guardians or their parents to put these books in front of their kids or convince these kids to ask their parents for things. And they often, you know, 11, 12, 13. I don't know if you have any kids of your own or if you work with kids, children of that age aren't especially keen all the time on talking to adults or taking advice from adults or suggestions from adults. So it's challenging. I've been very fortunate that my books did find an audience. it got in front of the right people. And to be honest, the second one did. the first one, almost nobody knew existed until the second one came out.
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> Ryan Consel>But it happened to catch a few of the right people at the right time, and they talked about it, told their friends, parents told each other about the books, kids told each other about the books, and they kind of took off. So part of the success of a book series is having the patience to wait for that series to become successful. That was a long and rambling answer, to your first question. And I think I can sum it up by saying there isn't one way. you really have to just give the book as many opportunities as possible to be successful. It's sort of like rolling the dice every time you put it out there. And so the more times you roll those dice, the better odds there are of a book catching on.
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> Ryan Consel>Oh, sorry.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Oh, no, Go ahead.
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> Ryan Consel>To hit your second question of how do we know when to end a series? Because, yeah, the fourth book is closing out the series. that is a harder question.
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> Ryan Consel>I can only answer that for myself and for this series. this was a series about found family and friendships and growing from a place of loneliness and despair to finding a place of belonging and, family and hope. And there was a steady trend of that through the series. There was also, as many series have, escalations of threats and of dangers. And as we come to the fourth book, we're hitting the point that if the dangers and the threats, escalated any further, it would stop being the same kind of series. people would have to die.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>The.
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> Ryan Consel>This isn't that kind of series. Also, we came to really satisfying m. Not end points of the character stories. They're only 16, but very good closure of their arcs up until they're 16 for each of the characters. And it felt very satisfying.
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> Ryan Consel>And going any further felt like it would be dragging the series out. And I wasn't convinced I could do the characters, a good service. and I think it might. Any further escalation would undermine a lot of the joy and satisfaction that came at the end of the fourth book.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, let's talk about the way that you use to write fantasy books.
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> Ryan Consel>sorry. The tools are my process.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Yes.
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> Ryan Consel>so, I suppose my Process is, I think calling, a lot of authors process. A process might be a misnomer. I can absolutely talk about how I come up with books and how they get written. I don't know that it's advisable, but hopefully it will offer some comfort to other writers that think that their process should be a bit more disciplined and orderly. I usually start with an idea that gets stuck in my brain and I can't get it out. in the case of stealing from wizards, we were on a camping trip, we had a conversation around a campfire about what a Canadian wizard school would be like. And I got stuck in my brain and rolled around there for a couple of years, growing and growing and sort of getting polished and more and more, fleshed out until it reached a point that I could do almost nothing productive with my life except write that down. And then over the course of a couple of months, all of the words for the first book came out. so pickpocketing. I think I wrote almost the full, like 95,000 words in two months in evenings after work. But that did have two years of imagining and playing with the ideas and world building and note taking, before that happened. Now the notes are not orderly or organized. There isn't a clear and carefully constructed outline. And until I started writing, I wasn't even sure I was ever going to write it.
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> Ryan Consel>but it just became a, ah, fixation and kind of an obsession for that couple of months, where all the words needed to come out. And then of course after sort of a binge writing period like that, it wasn't necessarily particularly good. So then walking away from a project like this for a few weeks or a couple of months so you can come back at it with fresh eyes for the edits was super important, at least for me, so that those edits can be fresh. You can see the flaws and the strengths in it in a real way. And then I think I mentioned this earlier, feeding it out to a community of other people, trusted people who you can take criticism from. And that's a really critical part of the writing process is getting that critique, and being able to take it well because, I mean, I loved my art, I was very proud of what I'd created. But I also knew it could be better with some fairly brutal, brutal, critical feedback from other people. So sending it out, getting that feedback, making the changes, repeating that process until it really is, good enough and polished enough for you to be able to put it out and be proud of, was a critical part of at least my writing process. And then there's the boring parts where you get a copy editor. Make sure you know where the comments or the commas and periods and semicolons go. Super, valuable, but less exciting.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any other upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to know about.
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> Ryan Consel>honestly, with the fourth book coming out, I have ideas for other books in the future, but I am going to take a much needed break. it's been an eight year journey from the first book to the fourth, to the conception of the first book to the release of the fourth book. And I think I just need to walk out and figure out who I am and what I want to create now. that stealing from wizards is finally sort of packaged up and out of my brain.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, so listeners can keep up with everything that you're up to. Throw out your contact info.
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> Ryan Consel>Oh, absolutely. so I'm on blueskyealingfromwizards, dot com. I am also on Instagram under Student of Whim. I've been there for a long time and you can see some of my other projects because I don't just write. I'm also a costumer and prop builder, occasional armorsmith.
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> Ryan Consel>You can keep up with me there. You can also find me on TikTok at the same place under Student of Whim.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on any final thoughts you have for the listeners.
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> Ryan Consel>Oh, absolutely. That's very kind of you. I think just for those people who are listening, to me rant about the writing process. in with aspirations of becoming writers yourself, it's really valuable to build a community as you get into writing. those are both other writers who you can share the trials of tribulations of the process with and get sage advice from. and also readers, people who are going to love your work.
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> Ryan Consel>building that community up is really the best place to start to get the kind of support and advice you're going to need if you're going to produce books, especially multiple books, because it is a long in process and having some company along the way is really, really valuable.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, ladies and gentlemen, please be sure to check out Ryan's Notebook coming out on November 4th. Check out the series follow rate Review Share this episode to all the fantasy fans out there to as many people as possible, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. And for more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, to be a guest or if you know someone who would like to be a guest, visit www.craveball337.com thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Ryan, thank you for all that you do. And thank you for joining me.
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> Ryan Consel>Thank you so much for having me.
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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.craveball337.com until next time, keep Living the dream.
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